Quoting a U.N. climate official, the Associated Press reported dire warnings of what’s in store for planet Earth if humans do not reverse the trend on carbon emissions in 10 years.Possible consequences include 1930s-style Dust Bowl conditions in U.S. and Canadian wheat fields, the disappearance of entire countries by rising sea levels and millions of “eco-refugees” triggered by crop failures and coastal flooding.A fifth of Egypt’s arable land might be flooded; a sixth of Bangladesh might be underwater, displacing 22.5 million people.“The most conservative scientific estimate [is] that the Earth’s temperature will rise 1 to 7 degrees in the next 30 years,” the story states.If those warnings sound familiar, it’s because Americans hear them on a regular basis. It underpins the ambitious – some say unrealistically ambitious – Green New Deal proposal that aims to transform the way the country powers its homes and industries in 10 years.What gives the AP article perspective, however, is the date it was published – June 29, 1989.Noel Brown, director of the New York office of the U.N. Environment Program, told the wire service that the world had until 2000 to reverse course. If not, the dire consequences would come to pass in about 30 years.Meaning this year.This is not an exercise in “climate denial.” The AP story from 1989 does not prove that climate change is a “hoax” or anything of the sort. It merely is a cautionary tale about the limitations of using complicated computer models to forecast global climate patterns with precision.In fact, according to data collected by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the planet has warmed since 1989 – just not by as much as Brown predicted. The average global surface temperature last year was 0.8 degrees Celsius higher than the yearly average since 1880. In 1989, the average surface temperature was 0.3 degrees Celsius above average.Bangladesh remains poor and has faced stress from coastal erosion. Residents have been displaced, but not by the magnitude of a quarter of the nation’s population that the United Nations predicted in 1989. In fact, Bangladesh has accepted hundreds of thousands of foreign refugees – Rohingya Muslims fleeing not climate catastrophe, but religious persecution in Myanmar.In the U.S. heartland, meanwhile, overall wheat yields have declined since 1989. But the yield per acre actually has increased. The Dust Bowl has not come.The Maldives, too, have battled erosion. But the islands off the coast of India are not buried underwater entirely, as the 1989 AP article suggested might be the case by now.The overwhelming majority of climate researchers believe that the Earth is warming and that it is caused partly or wholly by human activity. But the consensus breaks down when researchers venture specific forecasts and time horizons. Perhaps we have passed a tipping point. Maybe, we’re within 10 years or so of that threshold.Or, maybe the horizon stretches decades into the future.Humans had better hope for the latter. Because if saving life on Earth depends on eliminating or dramatically reducing carbon emissions in a decade, as this New York Times interactive model demonstrates, we are most likely doomed.